Every business has an ideal customer. Some businesses are very clear on who this person or company is. Some aren’t. While it is tempting to say you will deal with anyone that will pay you, it is not a wise marketing plan to approach marketing like shooting into the dark. In this post, DMM will guide you in how to figure out who your customers are and how to market to them.

Identifying your ideal customer

It will simplify your marketing efforts if you know where to aim your marketing efforts. You can identify your prospective customer’s specific needs, behaviours and pain points. This will help you tailor your approach and marketing to each type of customer that you want to attract. This ideal customer profile can also be referred to as your “buyer persona”.

One way to form your customer profiles is to look at who your current customers are. They can give you insight into why they are doing business with you, who they are and what your prospective clients are looking for. They can also help you identify customers that you don’t want to be targeting. You can then segment your customers according to your buyer personas and use your marketing in a highly targeted way. This will ensure you are communicating the message that is most appropriate to your customer, and most likely to convert a prospect into a sale.

How to create customer profiles

You can use research, surveys or interviews of your existing clients and prospects to form customer profiles. You can look at data collected on your CRM to discover any trends of commonalities that will give you insight into your customers and their behaviour. On your website, you can collect data from your leads via forms or website analytics. Social media insights and communities could provide some insight into your customers. Involve your sales team and customer services team to give you more anecdotal information.

While forming a customer profile you could consider the following aspects for the profile:

• Demographics
• Education level
• Socioeconomic information
• Profile of your customer’s business
• Position in company
• Seasonal buying behaviour
• Interests and hobbies
• Internet usage behaviour
• Sales cycle information
• Communication channels they prefer

What to do with customer profiles

Once you have a thorough understanding of your customers, you can tailor your messages and modes of communication to them. Writing your customer profiles down and having them available to everyone in your business can be very helpful. Each of your business units will need to know how to deal with each customer profile. So your sales team will know to target an email with relevant statistics that prove your product’s contribution to profitability when targeting a busy decision-maker. In another case, a phone call to a marketing executive with a quick overview of the performance of the service for the last month will be more useful than a lengthy and wordy emailed report. This approach will save you time, money and effort while improving your conversion rate. It is definitely worth developing buyer personas and refining them constantly as your business evolves.

Need some help with formulating buyer personas for your business?